Walter Benjamin wrote this essay in 1935 with fascism in the crosshairs. His subject: the moment art stopped being one thing in one place and became anything, anywhere, forever.
What dies in that change is what he called the aura. The singularity of a thing made by one hand at one moment, never to recur. The exact thing an Instagram post can’t hold, even if you really believe it does.
What’s taken the place of aura is reach. And reach is political. This move’s the question slightly. Not can music be reproduced, but instead, who owns the machine that does the reproducing, and what they need you to feel.
India should actually find all of this complicated but it doesn’t. Here, music was never scarce. It lived in our bodies, in our streets and our rituals. Qawwali, kirtan, garba, the roadshow. None of it asked a record label or a platform’s permission. The aura there was never the object. It was the gathering.
Then, the platforms arrived and priced our musical culture at fractions of a paisa and told artists to write for an algorithm tuned to another country’s ears.
Reproduction didn’t just change how the music travelled. It changed what music was allowed to become. Our discussion begins there.
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